News and views about legal academia and the legal profession by Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Dan Filler (Drexel University)

May 14, 2013

Trasviña Named Dean of USF

John Trasviña, the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been appointed dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law. He holds a JD from Stanford and previously headed up the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

May 13, 2013

Brooks from Yale to Columbia

Richard Brooks, a leading contracts and law & economics scholar at Yale Law School, has accepted a senior offer from Columbia. He's the second senior faculty member to move from Yale to Columbia in recent years (the other being tax scholar Michael Graetz).

UPDATE: Jonathan Adler (Case Western) points out that technically Brooks is the third, since Thomas Merrill moved from Columbia to Yale a few years ago, but then moved back to Columbia about a year later.

Richard Epstein on Harper's "The Lawyer Bubble"

From the conclusion of what is a quite measured review of a lazy and careless book: "Mr. Harper's blunderbuss condemnation of most large firms and most law schools is off-target. By and large, they have proved resilient in a competitive legal climate."

"Unsubstantiated assertion" and "platitudinous self-congratulation"

Professor Silver’s response [to Tamanaha] contains a number of unsubstantiated assertions. This Essay addresses three of them....These claims illustrate how, in my view, the crisis of the American law school is in large part a product of the tendency of law school faculty to indulge in platitudinous self-congratulation...

when juxtaposed in the very same piece with this bit of unsubstantiated self-congratulation:

These facts [about the bad job market for new lawyers and the high cost of law school], which are central to Tamanaha’s argument that the economics of American legal education are broken, did not become generally known through a perfect storm of market correction but rather via the efforts of a committed cadre of reformers....

I guess those who fancy themselves part of a "cadre" can't be expected to substantiate their self-congratulation.